Lessons in Leadership

[Authors note: Edited text of a speech at the Jaffna Hindu College Old Boys Association (UK) Social Event: Kalaiarasi (31 October 2009)]

Thank you very much for inviting me as Chief Guest. This is a new experience. Nobody has invited me to such a wonderful event before. There are four reasons why I have chosen to speak in English today.

First, I have never spoken in Tamil from a stage. When you don’t have that experience, it can be very dangerous to try. I recall the story of Badiuddin Mohammed, the Minister for Education in Sirimavo’s government. He came to Jaffna University to open some building. The hosts had said “Speak in English Sir, everybody will understand.”  “No,” he said, “Naan Thamizhan, Thamizhile pEsa vENdum”:

“naangaL ellaarum, engaLidam uLLa vErupaadukalai maranthu, Singalam, Thamil, Muslim enru illaamal, oru thaai makkaLaaha onrukku iruppOm”.

“onraaha iruppOm” translates to “lets be united” while “onrukku iruppOm” means “lets urinate”! The linguistic difference is small but the semantic difference put Mohammed in deep trouble that day.

I remember at the event we laughed and jeered much more than you are laughing now; that was because we had a score to settle with Mohammed. He was the one who changed the university admission system, introducing ethnicity- and district-based quotas. This was, and still is, quoted as one of the main reasons for the growth of Tamil unhappiness in post-independence Sri Lanka. But things have moved on. Today, you will find that the university entry score for the Jaffna district is lower than some others – progress?

My second reason is that my late father taught English at JHC. So it might be considered pretty normal for the English master’s son to speak in English. Some of you were in his class. So, if by any chance you had got detention or a shot with the cane, please consider that it was in your best interests.

My third reason for choosing to speak in English is that, we are mostly Hindus. Ours is a very tolerant and liberal religion. We know that language is a medium of communication. It is the message that is important, not the medium. We practice it to the extreme, don’t we? Why else would we do the most important of our communications — that with our God, in a dead language? We never check to see if the priest is qualified to communicate on our behalf. All we are concerned about is that he has inherited genetic traits – his caste.

My final reason is this. At Jaffna Hindu College I learnt that mathematics was the language from God, more and more of its beauty waiting to be discovered – all the others were man-made, and have some finite life in the timescales of human evolution. At JHC, our mathematics teachers taught us its beauty. Our physics and chemistry teachers taught us how to solve difficult problems by expressing them in precise mathematical language. Absolutely fantastic education it was.

Education at JHC was not just about exams and university entry. We had a lot of fun. I played chess. We built enough critical mass of players to form a team and play tournaments with Colombo schools. Acquaintances I made then, stayed as friends much later in life. Sports can be very effective in building bridges between communities.

And there was political awareness. Those were the days of exponential rise of nationalistic thinking in the North – popular momentum was largely on the side of emotional nationalism as the right response of the minority community to any unfair behavior from the government apparatus. Some of us weren’t impressed with nationalism – which we thought was going to make it worse for the Tamil community in the long term – and we researched communist ideology, starting from the parliament speech of P. Kandia (Pt Pedro), at the debate following the Official Language Act in 1956. Chairman Mao became our hero. Not much came out of our efforts, I admit, even though some in our company were so hot on Mao that when it rained in China, they opened their umbrellas in Jaffna!

I want to share with you what I really learnt at JHC. It is about leadership. Two things I learnt from the principals of JHC, E.Sabalingam and P.S.Kumaraswamy, turned out to be extremely useful when I had to play a leadership role in my career.

Sabalingam was Principal when I joined JHC; I had just done my GCSE O/L at Bandarawela, and moved to Jaffna before the results of the O/L were known; I went to meet Sabalingam and asked for a place in the 10 repeat class. This is the class you stay in after sitting your O/L; when the results were released, those who pass go onto year 11 to do A/L, the rest stay on in 10R and did O/L again. Sabalingam didn’t think much of me. Coming from an estate school, he thought I wasn’t going to pass O/L, so he gave me a place in 10R.

Sabalingam, as you know, was like an army general. He set high standards, and expected you to follow him. If you were not with him, you were in real trouble. He wasn’t of the type that took prisoners.

When my O/L results came, couple of months later, I had done rather well; gaining a grade that only thee JHC students bettered. Thus I got into grade11 at JHC by the back door. Couple of days later, Sabalingam came past our class and called me out. I went to him shaking in fear… what have I done wrong?

“Sorry, I was wrong about you” he said, “Congratulations”. It was shocking. Can you believe that?  That great general came to this little guy and accepted that he was wrong! Said he was sorry!

P.S.Kumaraswamy was different. The College continued to flourish under his leadership. Like Sabalingam, he also set high standards. But his style was one of building consensus. He took the final decisions, and took responsibility for them. But everyone had their opportunity to express their view, however clever, critical or stupid they were.

These two qualities of leadership — of accepting mistakes and building democratic consensus, are lessons I never forgot.

I want to end by suggesting that these lessons I cherish may have a wider role I would like you to think about. Are there examples where there was failure of leadership along these lines? Not accepting errors and making course corrections; not allowing space for consensus building along democratic lines? At the level of community and country, back home, have such failures of leadership cost us enormously?

I would like you to think about such failures; I don’t want to give you answers; we get told a lot; we get given a lot of data; but it is our responsibility, and ours alone, to critically evaluate such things and seek the underlying truth. That would be the best outcome of the wonderful education we had at Hindu College, and a tribute to those who educated us. Nobody put this better than ThiruvaLLUvar:

EpporuL yaar yaar vaaik kEdpinum

ApporuLil meip poruL kaaNpathu aRivu.

Thank you.